Is 30 Minutes of Exercise Daily Enough to Counteract Hours of Sitting?

Is 30 Minutes of Exercise Daily Enough to Counteract Hours of Sitting?
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If you want to make sure you will benefit from long term health, make sure you move your body as much as possible!

As you may be aware, CDC guidelines recommend you exercise for at least 30 minutes per day but is half an hour of movement enough to counter the negative effects of sitting for most of the rest of the day?

After all, even with the minimum exercise done, you are still likely to experience all kinds of aches including in your back, hips and shoulders at the end of a long day of office work.

In other words, it’s quite clear that those 30 minutes of movement are not nearly enough to cancel out a whole day of sitting.

Basically, the more you move, the healthier you’ll be so try not to just do the bare minimum if you want a long, pain free life.

Sitting is clearly bad for us. Medical specialists warn that it can weaken your large leg and gluteal muscles which then increases the risk of injury in your 50s and over.

The hip flexors are bound to be affected as well, which in turn, will lead to problems with hip joints later on in life.

Furthermore, poor posture can compress the discs in your spine to compress far more than they should, speeding up their degeneration.

With that being said, a new JAMA Cardiology study, which featured no less than 100,000 participants, shows that sitting for over 8 hours every day greatly contributes to a much higher risk of dying from a cardiovascular disease.

On the other hand, sitting for less than 4 hours per day and also exercising, was proven to significantly reduce those risks.

A second study from last year, published in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, looked into the benefits of exercising for 30 minutes every day by following more than 130,000 volunteers for around 14 years!

What the researchers learned was that, indeed, that half an hour of physical activity was able to reduce the risk of early death by no less than 80 percent in those who spent less than 7 hours sitting.

Of course, it was less effective for those who spent 7 to 11 hours sitting and there was no change in the case of those who sat for over 11 hours every day.

What this means is that for some people, 30 minutes of exercise daily might be enough while others, who spend more time sitting, will also need more active time to counteract their sitting time.


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Katherine is just getting her start as a journalist. She attended a technical school while still in high school where she learned a variety of skills, from photography to nutrition. Her enthusiasm for both natural and human sciences is real so she particularly enjoys covering topics on medicine and the environment.

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